The Shorter German Verse Texts

Summary

COMMONLY, THE OLDEST written documents of any culture are ritual, historical, and legal texts embodying the religious and cultural concerns of a people. These are often verse texts, reflecting a pre-literary, pre-textual origin, since rhythm, alliteration, assonance and, later, rhyme, make the material memorable and carry it from generation to generation until it is written down. At the same time, their carefully crafted form lends them a heightened expression and raises them above the everyday. Early German poetry also comes to us refracted through writing; we know nothing directly of popular oral poetry and song among the illiterate Germans, and what we know indirectly comes mostly from condemnatory statements by concerned clerical writers who use vague terms asymmetrically. The Christian-Latin labels hymnus and (p)salm(us) are not applied to secular songs, whereas terms like carmen, cantica, and cantus are used for both Christian and secular song. But, given the forms of some Christian-German poems, we can reasonably surmise that features of secular song, folk-songs and native oral traditions have been borrowed deliberately to work in an idiom known to the secular population. That native literary idiom, which must have had variations, was familiar to many monks and nuns who came from noble families and knew the secular life of the court from childhood. In particular, early German Christian alliterative poetry seems to represent the adaptation, not the replication of native traditions, but so, more subtly, does Otfrid, whose strophes of long, internally rhymed lines eventually gave way to the short, four-stress rhyming couplets that form the basis of Middle High German narrative verse.